This post gets its own response. I hope stoney is still here
🙂
Firstly, I wasn't necessarily arguing that schools would pay for this service. Rather, I said that they would and probably do search and review profiles of applicants.
Well, yes, that we agree on.
🙂 I'm sure that they do commonly search the unprotected facebook profiles. What I was responding to was this:
scapermoya said:
how can you be confident that a school requesting information directly from facebook isn't given some kind of access us peons don't know about.
To me, that means them getting some sort of special access to security-protected facebook profiles. Obviously, if you post something sketchy on facebook and then don't put security on your profile, you only have yourself to blame. But if you utilize facebook's security settings, I think you should feel relatively confident that you are protected. There's no reason for facebook to give any sort of "special access" to schools if they don't give money.
lstone said:
Secondly, the manpower involved wouldn't be as extensive as you argue. Sure, if one person was in charge of 500 applicants and had to review them within one day's time, then you're right, there simply wouldn't be enough manpower. However, this is most likely not the case. Example: After an interview with a faculty interviewer, the interviewer takes 1 minute to search google and/or facebook for the interviewees name. They take an extra minute to review or skim through what they find. End result? An added 2 minutes to interview time. Not too much manpower involved at all, eh?
I do think you're slightly underestimating the amount of time it would take to skim their profile, but I do admit I hadn't thought of that method.
lstone said:
Thirdly, the point of looking at a facebook page may not be to "raise red flags." Rather, it could be to get a better picture of the applicant and see if they represent themselves consistently through their application and through a social-networking site. That could provide insight into the character of the person without necessarily raising any red flags. So you ask, how much is it really worth to check into facebook? An extra 2 minutes, at probably no extra cost, to confirm the impression you received after interview. I think it would be very worth it in the minds of several interviewers.
Sure. But I don't think an applicant should fear any of that. I'm not really all that anonymous here on SDN, and I wasn't last year. I don't have anything I wouldn't want anyone to see on my facebook, or post anything I care about on here. If I did, I would probably take extra security measures, which some people should do
🙂
lstone said:
From the aspect of facebook, assuming that there was some sort of monetary transaction to grant schools/employers access, then it would make sense financially to allow it. They could profit from such a transaction (think of how many schools/employers might potentially invest in this), and so long as this transaction was kept quiet or under the radar, it wouldn't make a difference to facebook users. Furthermore, you are implying that the transaction would be expensive for schools to use, when really, with low prices to allow access to profiles, facebook could profit greatly from the mere quantity of schools/employers willing to pay a low price for such great access. Besides, as I mentioned already, I am pretty sure it is already within the user agreement that they have rights over the information presented on their website, so they would not be required to notify anybody about such a transaction whatsoever.
Moreover, concerning facebook's perspective, you're assuming here that there is a monetary transaction. If there isn't and interviewers simply view that information or those profiles which are public or semi-public, then facebook would have no reason to notify users. Also, you say that an adcom member would let it slip that they've used Facebook to a student. Now, why would you think this would happen? And even if it did happen, why would you think that this one leak would become public enough to cause Facebook to suffer and invariably not allow these types of transactions (if that's what's happening) to continue? Then, there's the assumption that the student would further reveal this "slip" so that Facebook would even be aware of or care about the problem. If this "slip" occurred, would the student care to reveal that it had happened? Probably not, especially if something embarassing or incriminating had been raised to question in the interview.
Again, anything that had to do schools/employers just looking at the publicly accessible content, I'm sure that happens, and I'm sure it doesn't involve a monetary transaction.
In reference to the bolded, what I meant is that if there WAS some secret agreement between schools and facebook to get access to private info, eventually, somewhere, an adcom member would eventually have THEIR OWN CHILD (not a student) go through the application process and would tell their kid to kill their facebook because of the shady agreement. That kid then tells their friends, who tell their friends... and eventually a group gets made on facebook, and then it's kind of a big deal. At least that's how I see it happening in my head. An adcom probably wouldn't tell any random student, but I can sure see them tellling their own kid.
